Chance Press News and Notes on 'Acontextual Drawings'

We did what amounts to a ’soft’ release of our three newest books around 6 weeks ago, making the trade editions available to our repeat customers and sending out an email blast… but still no information on the site! Mostly, that’s because we’re lazy, and updating the website is often the last thing that we want to do, and so we put it off and hope no one notices. But this time, there’s a little more to it – we’re also working on a new online store hosted by BigCartel that will handle online transactions a far sight better than our crappy “Buy Books” page that we’ve used for the last year or so. We like BigCartel because they don’t require you to register in order to place an order, which makes them much more customer-friendly than sites like Etsy or Artfire. So, we’re working on that as well as creating pages on this site for each of the new books, and as with everything we do, it’s taking a while.

As far as what we’ve been working on, most of January was spent on the special and deluxe editions of Acontextual Drawings, our recently-published book by cartoonist Abbigail McCracken. Trade editions are available now, and the deluxe editions will be available hopefully by the middle of February. I wasn’t sure at first what I wanted for the cover of the deluxe edition – we usually just do a pastedown on fancy paper, but I wanted to go for something more elaborate this time. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to do a double-layer print of a “colored in” version of one of the drawings from the book. The top layer, then, is a printout of the drawing as it appears in the book, and the bottom layer is a printout of just the colors that fill in the drawing (but no lines). Since both are printed on vellum, the colors show through the top layer, and it looks pretty neat. When the book is closed, it’s fairly dull, although the colors get more vibrant when held up to light.

That edition also comes with a 5 x 7 archival print, signed by the artist. I’m still waiting to get those back from Abbigail, and then this edition will be available for sale (at a very reasonable price of $20).

Now, say that $20 wasn’t enough money, and you wanted something really awesome. You’re in luck! We’re also doing a VERY limited 5-copy hardcover portfolio that includes the a copy of the deluxe edition described above AS WELL AS archival prints of all eight drawings from the book – all of which are signed by the artist. (Prints are 5.5 x 8.5 on Moab Entrada Rag Bright 300gsm paper.) The cover pastedown is printed on Canson Infinity Montval Torchon, a very unique paper with a nice eggshell texture. Boards are covered in Hahnemuhle Ingres paper and Canson Mi-Teintes, with Japanese bookcloth on the spine. Finally, cloth-covered handmade paper triangle pockets hold everything together inside the portfolio. I don’t have the prints back yet, so no photos of those, but you can see everything else in the pictures below. Price for these is $75 – and remember that there are only 5, so get in while the getting’s good!